


all for freedom and for pleasure

by futuredescending



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: English Department Politics, Hot Sexy Professor AU, M/M, Worker Strikes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2018-08-28 23:20:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8466829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/pseuds/futuredescending
Summary: Harry Hart is the Director of Kingsman University's newly renamed Richmond D. Valentine Creative Writing Programme. Eggsy Unwin is the new janitor. Together, they fight elitist ivory tower attitudes, writer's block, worker strikes, inter-departmental politics, irreverent TAs, dogged book editors, and really godawful first-year writing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [missbecky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/missbecky/gifts).



> Basically, this is all the fault of missbecky, as well as the recent images of Colin Firth looking like the sexy professor you wished you had. Also I make no promises to update this with any sort of regularity. I'm already on the hook for too many others. What am I even doing?

“The sun was a great, merciless monolith in the sky that shone upon the elite and poor alike, that which took no prisoners. Not the ravaged, decimated skeletons that still somehow walked and talked and suffered,” Charlie Hesketh read from the sheaf of printed pages in his hands. “Not my pale skin, beaded with exertion, unrelentingly exposed to Sol’s judgement.”

“ _Jesus fucking Christ_ ,” Roxy muttered under her breath as she sat back and crossed her arms, just loud enough for Harry to hear her.

He couldn’t quite bring himself to reprimand her, though. That would involve prying his hand away from his lips, and it was currently the only thing keeping the screams from escaping.

“One of them broke off from the huddled mass and loped over to me,” Charlie continued, approximating a three-second pause to look up and meet another workshop student’s eyes between every sentence for maximum dramatic effect, which unfortunately lost its impact ten minutes and three paragraphs later. “He couldn’t have been more than eight, yet his skin was well burnished like old, worn leather and his eyes were the colour of the primitive earth itself, an abyss upon which I gazed, and it gazed back.”

A loud scoff pulled Harry’s attention back to Roxy, and that of a few nearby students. Her shoulders trembled in an effort to restrain her mirth. “My god, he’s written the next _Hundred Years of Solitude_!”

Harry rewarded the more nosey students with a stern look to discourage further eavesdropping and leaned in closer to his TA. “Do try and contain yourself, Morton. This is an open and supportive environment.”

“Sorry. Sorry,” she whispered without an ounce of contrition. “Shall I make my critique more poetic? How about...he sounds like a baby elephant wailing for his dead mum, Harry. If said mum were an allegory for lost innocence. I’m against poaching as a rule, but in this case, I might make an exception.”

“Your feedback doesn’t count,” Harry reminded her. “You’re not even the TA for _this_ _course_.”

Moreover, Roxy wasn’t even in the Creative Writing programme. She willingly bore the ambitious burden of a double major in political science and literature. Harry advised her thesis on Shakespeare’s King Richard plays and she soldiered through thirty trite essays on logos, pathos, and ethos for the general composition course Chester King made Harry teach every fucking term out of punishment. Why she always lingered at the back of Harry’s first-year fiction writing workshops—nevermind where she even found the time—he couldn’t even begin to fathom. Roxy told him it was because she found them entertaining, but Harry had a partly-formed suspicion it had more to do with the dark haired, stony faced, and very, for lack of a more fitting descriptor that really said it all, _Gallic_ Gaëlle Valentine, who always sat in the front row and sometimes unnerved Harry with how infrequently she blinked.

Said curtain of black hair suddenly stirred, and both Harry and Roxy froze, the former out of an irrational fear the student in question had somehow gleaned his thoughts, the latter for...well, likely much the same reason.

“Very lyrical, Charlie. I practically felt myself withering in all the hot air,” Gaëlle praised in her inflectionless voice, though she still managed to sow an expression of unnecessary self-satisfaction upon Charlie’s face

The most intriguing thing about Gaëlle was that Harry still couldn’t tell if she was being authentically sincere or the biggest troll he’d had in class to date. Roxy argued that Gaëlle had excellent taste, but a) Roxy was transparent in her biases and b) like Roxy, Gaëlle also wasn’t a Creative Writing major so much as a biomed student who found herself short a general education credit in her senior year and had assumed a fiction workshop would be an easy pass. She well and truly may not know better, nor, perhaps, would even have cared.

Her inscrutability was not, however, shared among her fellow workshop participants, most of whom were regarding Charlie with gushing reverence.

“You really painted an image in my head,” Hugo enthused as Charlie bowed his head in noble acceptance of the praise. “I felt like I was right there in the muck with you.”

“It’s so visceral,” Angela added. “Was this based on your real life experiences?”

“It’s partially based on the week I spent volunteering in a remote Malawi village,” Charlie said, nodding.

Harry could practically see the hearts enlarging in several of the women’s (and some of the men’s—he amended, after a brief glance to Hugo) eyes, and decided to step in with some order before someone got it in their heads to petition the Nobel committee to award Charlie a prize. “Alright, thank you, Charlie, you may sit down now. That was very….” His mind flipped through several words, trying to decide what would be most diplomatic, loathing the fact he had to participate in this whole ridiculous charade in the first place. “...meditative.” He ignored Roxy’s rude snort. “Perhaps you ought to experiment with a voice that isn’t your own in order to challenge yourself, given how well you’ve thoroughly mined your own...er, depths.”

“But shouldn’t we only write what we know?” Charlie argued, staring at Harry as if he were a particularly stupid child. “It’s the only way to accurately depict our own truths.”

Several heads around the room nodded at this sage wisdom. Roxy had practically disappeared beneath her desk in a seizure brought on by, undoubtedly, holding back her laughter for too long.

“Right.” Harry rubbed his temple, dislodging and knocking his glasses off his face. It was going to be a long term.

 

_____

 

After the workshop, Harry joined the stream of students escaping their morning classes. Kingsman University's London setting meant there weren’t many of the distinct features of a campus, but the university had been making steady progress towards purchasing nearly the entire city block through the years, so it was caffeine-deprived students as far as the eye could see, wandering zombie-like through pavement and road without discernment, much to the irritation of the unfortunate passing cars.

“Harry,” greeted Merlin as he fell seamlessly into step beside him and matching his gait. Together they could more or less take up the width of the pavement and subtly intimidate the sluggish sea of students to part before their swift, long-legged strides. “You get the Chancellor’s memo?”

Harry grimaced. “The endowment from the tech gazillionaire, isn’t it?”

“That would be the one, yes.”

“It appears we’re all too happy to let anyone come in and rename half our bloody departments and buildings if the price is high enough.” In fact, Chester had put forth Harry’s writing programme as the English Department tribute. Every time he heard the newly christened _Richmond D. Valentine Creative Writing Programme_ , it made him fume all over again. The man thought the height of artistic integrity was an ill-advised rap single he had issued five years ago, for fuck’s sake. “Self-congratulatory, narcissistic gestures. And you know the money won’t go towards anything truly impactful like affordable student housing or raising the minimum wage for staff.”

“I don’t care if they want to rename Computer Science the V-Spot Fuck Machine so long as they give me the funding,” Merlin dismissed with a wave of his hand, long inured to Harry’s rants about the state of the world.

“Easy for you to say. They’re throwing piles of money at you without asking for so much as a plaque,” Harry said sourly.

“We have to name a robot after his daughter,” Merlin admitted. “I’m thinking maybe the gazelle.”

“You mean that bizarre metal contraption that’s supposed to be gracefully leaping about and not constantly tipping over and breaking off its own legs?”

“We may have some kinks to work out,” Merlin defended before his face broke out in delighted epiphany, which was truly a frightening expression on him. “You realise they’re going to ask you to make a thank you speech at the ceremony.”

“I shall refuse,” Harry said flatly. “For one, it wouldn’t even be true. My programme won’t see a pence if Chester has any say in the matter.”

“What does creative writing even need a budget for other than to host your little bourgie wine and cheese parties?”

Harry steadfastly ignored him.“I still can’t wrap my head around why some American tech entrepreneur gives a shit about a second-string uni creative writing programme in the first place.”

“Isn’t his daughter in your class?”

“In body if not exactly in spirit,” Harry said. “Charlie’s also in that one. A delightful combination at eight am.”

Merlin gave him a look that was half sympathy, half schadenfreude. “What had you done to piss off Chester now?”

“Nothing this time, I’ll have you know.” Harry scowled. “Chester wants to make sure his nephew is being well looked after, and for some god-forsaken reason, thinks I’m the one to do it.”

“Chester thinks you’re an overly-modern hedonistic dandy. Why he would entrust his nephew into your care, I can’t even begin to fathom.”

“He’s also a vindictive bastard who wants to teach Charlie a lesson about not going to business school like he had intended for him.” And now Harry was made to suffer the spoiled little shit who fancied himself as the next Great British Writer. Worst of all, Harry couldn’t actually give him any useful criticism for fear of, if not getting outright sacked—the blessed mercies of achieving tenure before post-secondary administrations started realising such things weren’t cost-effective for their margins—then incurring a double teaching load of all first-year courses and introductory seminars the next year because it was true: Chester really wasn’t all too fond of him nor the creative writing programme as a whole.

 _Hardly a serious pursuit of study, isn’t it?_ He could picture Chester tutting as if he expected Harry, actual published novelist and doctorate-wielding professor of writing, to agree.

“Speaking of punishment, how’s the book coming along?”

“It’s….” Harry struggled to find a way to positively frame the situation but finally had to confess, “...not.”

“I’m sure James is over the moon about hearing that,” Merlin remarked.

“If so, I wouldn’t know anything about it.”

But Merlin had his number for decades now, only arching a brow in response to Harry’s projected innocence. “Dodging his calls, are we?”

“I’ve been _busy_ ,” Harry insisted as his feet automatically directed them to the student-run _Cafe Nated_ at the end of the road.

“You’ve been _avoiding..._ ” When Merlin saw where they were headed, he audibly groaned. “For Christ’s sake, Harry. Why do you keep making us go here?”

“I like it,” Harry said.

“No you don’t,” Merlin snapped. “The coffee is overpriced shite, the workers hate you, and the whole concept is ridiculous. I’d rather drink the burnt sludge they serve at Starbucks.”

Merlin wasn’t...well, _wrong_ , per se. The little independent establishment was very proud of its nouveau gimmick that had been well-publicised in _London Eater_ : the DIY coffee bar. Anyone could now build their own coffee monstrosity, from condensed milk lattes to coffee floats to shudder-inducing _savoury_ coffees (Coffee with chili powder! Coffee with bone broth!) and, of course, the uniformly disgusting matcha options. Harry couldn’t honestly say why he kept frequenting it save for the foolish hope things might turn around.

The cafe’s heat was set at maximum output even though temperatures had only started dipping into the lower 20s at best, and Harry could feel his forehead break out into a sweat as soon as he stepped through the door.

“Everything about this place is designed to spite you,” Merlin hissed, casting a paranoid glance around the establishment as if expecting bongo drum players to roll out of the shadows and put him at the centre of a slam poetry reading at any moment.

Harry stepped up to the counter and placed his order for the largest size black coffee he could get. 

“That’s £7.50,” the cashier said. Instead of letters, her name tag bore a sticker of a walrus.

“What if,” Harry started and from the periphery of his vision he could see Merlin rolling his eyes, “I didn’t want to use the…” God, he hated giving the name credence by voicing it, “ _Coffee Lab_. I just wanted the coffee?”

“All prices include access to the Coffee Lab,” the woman said.

“Yes, I’m aware,” Harry said patiently. “But what if I don’t want to use the Coffee Lab? I’ve never used the Coffee Lab. I just want the coffee, just a plain, black coffee.”

“Then it’s £7.50,” she repeated without a sliver of sympathy.

Harry gave up and forked over the tenner, and was even intimidated by a fiercely expectant look to throw the change into the tip jar despite the fact there was no additional customer service involved in siphoning coffee from the vats into his paper cup.

The coffee itself tasted like little more than scalding hot water perhaps originally sourced from the Thames (he wouldn’t put it past this place to do that under the banner of sustainability). Harry doubted the solution was to froth avocado oil with it.

“Don’t you dare say anything,” he warned Merlin.

 

_____

 

By the time Harry finally managed to stumble through the door of his office, it was getting on well into late evening and the rest of the floor had long since emptied out for the day. He had taught his afternoon graduate workshop, fielded three unscheduled meetings, and was somehow volunteered for the English Department Graduate Student Affairs committee he had no knowledge of ever indicating he had an interest in. Sometimes, Harry envied how none of these inconveniences ever fell into Merlin’s lap the way they seemed to his. Either the Computer Science department was staffed with less wankers overall or Merlin possessed that vaguely alarming quality that subconsciously warned others not to fuck with him lest they find themselves doxxed and subscribed to every magazine publication and self-produced porn video site on earth.

His office voicemail yielded nothing of particular interest (one message from Chester informing him he better not be late again to the Thursday faculty meeting that Harry deleted half-way through, three messages from James that started out jovial and grew increasingly more irritated, one vaguely concerning message from a nervous student who tended to have an anxiety attack every comma splice, and a media request for an interview that was undoubtedly going to be about when the second novel would come out) nor his post (several packages containing books from fresh-faced authors hoping for a blurb, various student club announcements, some rogue printed flyer about the failed talks between the workers’ union and administration, a letter from the Chancellor announcing Valentine’s generous gift to the school and the upcoming schedule for all the various pompous celebrations and ceremonies therein). Most of the latter ended up in the bins or piled on top of other stacks of papers and folders scattered all about his cluttered office to be bothered with later or, more likely, never.

Harry sat back in his ergonomic chair and surveyed his domain of felled trees and internal chaos made physical: welcome to his life. He went for the bottom right hand drawer of his desk and fished out the half-empty Macallan 18, diminishing its contents by a few hearty swallows.

Now fortified, Harry pulled up his email and read through about 50 (five from students arguing about their last assignments, 20 from the damned listserv where a passionate battle was being waged over the subversiveness of using parentheses in titles, and the rest were spam, calls for papers, appeals for readings, commencement speeches, and other such media) before giving up and staring miserably at the depressingly large number of them still claiming the bold markings of **Unread**.

Without anything else by which to procrastinate (he was saving the YouTube videos for dire emergencies only), Harry pulled up his manuscript and stared at the mostly blank page along with its mocking cursor.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know _what_ he was going to write about or had done the research (had, in fact, taken a half-year long sabbatical to travel to Bosnia and Herzegovina to do just that, which hadn’t pleased Chester at all). At the heart of it, he wanted to tell the story of a Bosniak woman forced to return to her home country from whence she had fled to confront her memories of the war after her husband is posted there as Her Majesty’s British Ambassador. There was a story worth telling there, he knew. Trauma, memory, identity, and the complicated feelings surrounding the idea of _home_.

The thoughts and sentiments and longings were coursing through his head, and yet the words still refused to rise to the surface, his fingers stalling on his keyboard every time he moved his hands into home key position. There was something missing, he knew. A cornerstone that would hold all of it together, elevate it from mere words on the page into something transcendent and universal.

He was just about to bring daring recourse down upon the _A_ key when the soft chime of the lift doors opening perked his all-too-eager willingness to be distracted. The disappointing sound of a heavy cart on rickety wheels soon followed. Just the janitor, who was currently being far more productive than him. Harry sighed and ran a hand over his face, pushing his glasses up onto his head.

Ah, but what was that? Harry opened his eyes and perked his ears, straining to listen to the voice that floated down the corridor. _Singing_. Not at all bad singing either, though the echoes distorted the voice to somewhat chilling effect.

Harry pushed away from his desk and first popped his head out into the hall, bemused to discover the source of the singing coming from the young janitor who wore white earbuds attached to an mp3 player at his belt.

His back was turned to Harry, and he was even approximating a sort of hip-shimmying dance that drew attention to a rather well-sculpted rear. “ _Streetlights, people...living just to find emotion...hiding somewhere in the_ ,” the young man sang, pivoting on the heel of his trainer and catching sight of Harry now standing fully in his doorway, arms crossed, “ _Nii—_ holy shit!” The earbuds were snatched from his ears as the startled young man drew to attention. “Oh, shit, sorry! Uh, I mean, hi.”

“Hello,” Harry said, unable to keep the smile off his face.

“Sorry,” the young man said again. “Didn’t think anyone was here this time of night. Wouldn’t have made you suffer through that if I did.”

“It’s perfectly alright,” Harry said. “I was in want of a break anyway. You sing well.”

The man bit his lower lip. It was rather plush and dark, Harry idly noted, cursing himself all the while for picking up that observation and all the other stray details that presented themselves for his consumption. The janitor couldn’t have been older than his twenties with his enviously smooth skin, still more a boy, really.

He was more than just handsome, he was _pretty_. There was an intriguing mixture of angles and softness in his features. A tender slope of nose and dewdrop eyes. A geometrically wide jaw and sharply arched brows, one bearing the slash of an old scar right through it. Cheeks stained the lightest shade of embarrassed pink. The contradiction was born throughout the rest of his body. On the shorter side of average, bearing a rangy thinness at his waist but a solid muscular thickness in his limbs.

“Nah, but thanks anyway, Professor Hart.”

The familiarity caught Harry off guard. “Oh. Have we met before? I’m sorry, I’m bloody awful with names.”

“We haven’t, but...well, it’s on your door, innit?” He tentatively pointed to the plaque on the wall.

“Ah. Yes, right. That would make sense.” This time it was Harry’s turn to be embarrassed. “Forgive me, it’s been a long day.”

“Tell me about it. I’m, uh, Eggsy. Eggsy Unwin. New janitor,” Eggsy said, then patted the large blue bins on the cart behind him. “Which I reckon you’ve figured out.”

“Ulryk’s replacement,” Harry realised. Ulryk had been the English Department’s janitor since before Harry had been a doctorate student, having finally retired just this year after over forty years of service. In all that time, from student to associate to full faculty, the total number of conversations Harry had with the man could probably be numbered on his hands alone, none lasting more than a few minutes, never bothering to delve beneath the superficial layer of traded greetings and the occasional holiday variant.

For his retirement, Harry had felt compelled to give Ulryk a small gift of his favourite whiskey, awkwardly wishing him well. Ulryk’s soft, worn face had lit up as he looked up at Harry and told him he hoped his successor would give Harry’s windows a good clean every so often.

It was all a bit shameful, really. With this one, Harry thought, he promised to do better.

Out of sheer human decency, that was, and not because he was having obscene flights of fancy about what other talents lay behind those lips.

“Yeah,” Eggsy said. “Only started a week ago.”

“Well,” Harry said. “Welcome aboard. And I apologise for the state of my office. It’s, uh….”

“A work in progress?” Eggsy offered, which was just about the nicest thing anyone’s ever said of Harry’s workspace, ever. 

“Yes. A work in progress,” he affirmed, pleased. He would be using that from then on, at any rate. It had a whiff of the dramatic about it. “I’m usually here after hours. I find it easier to focus when no one else is about.”

“Suppose I ought to take the hint,” Eggsy hastily said, broadcasting his intent to slip past him into his office. “Empty your bins and leave you to it?”

Harry's first impulse was to stall, imploring him to stay a bit. There were several questions already lining themselves up on his tongue. What did Eggsy think of his new job? Did he like the school? What did he do in his spare time? What were his other interests? Exactly how much of an absent-minded professor type did Harry already come across as?

That last one made Harry inwardly wince. Said absent-minded professor ought to realise Eggsy had a job to do and a long night ahead. Sticking around to satisfy Harry’s sudden newfound curiosity was not really one of them and probably wasn’t all that appreciated either. “Right. Of course.” He stepped back to give Eggsy a wide berth adorned by a pained smile laced with what he hoped was enough apology for his rudeness.

Eggsy was efficient, grabbing Harry’s nearly empty bin and upending its contents into his larger one before slotting it back into its home beneath Harry’s desk. Harry was just relieved he hadn’t decided to finish the bottle tonight after all, else Eggsy could have added _pathetic_ onto the list of first impressions Harry had probably made. “Thank you.”

Eggsy gave him a quickfire grin that was half cheek and half vivid, unfiltered sunlight, gone too soon for Harry to bask in it. “Night, Professor Hart.”

“Please, call me Harry.”

“Harry,” Eggsy dutifully repeated before giving Harry a wink and a thumbs up that he immediately seemed to think better of. “Still Eggsy though.”

“Eggsy,” he tried out like a fine wine. Curious nickname. It had to be a nickname, he was sure. “Goodnight, Eggsy.”

He watched Eggsy push his bins down to the next office and go through the whole routine again before he realised how ridiculous and possibly perverted he looked just standing there watching him. With a hasty if belated start, he ducked back into his office and collapsed into his chair.

Once more, he regarded the computer screen, though it no longer seemed as forbidding. After taking a moment to marvel at this turn of events, he rested his fingers over the keys and reran the image of Eggsy Unwin in his mind. A joyously animated face that had been so open, almost guileless. He was young, wretchedly so.

 _You filthy old man_ , he chastised himself. Perhaps there really was some merit to Merlin’s claims he needed to get laid. He just hated to take the romantic advice of someone who showed more sexual interest in clean coding than human beings.

Yet by the time the clicking of the keys had stopped, there were pages upon pages of words on the screen. Granted, most of them were unwieldy paragraphs praising the beauty of youth and innocence with the sort of dippy awe more befitting a lovelorn teenager, but still.

There was a promising thread there, he decided, folding his hands beneath his chin. He only had to follow it into the labyrinth to see where it went.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry was probably one of the few faculty members of the school who didn’t commute into the city from his sprawling countryside-styled manor in Hertfordshire or Surrey. His parents had raised him up in one, of course, but even from a very young age, Harry knew his heart lied within the city and all the sins and pleasures it had to offer.

Such as it was, he had purchased his cosy townhome at the end of the little hidden-away mews in the early eighties on the cheap and its property value—and his increasingly younger, blander neighbours—had been multiplying exponentially ever since. It was modest in size and badly in need of some modern updates (separate hot and cold water taps were charming only in theory and his clawfoot tub didn’t have an overhead mount to even pretend to take a convenient shower), but Harry loved it all the same, from its rattling pipes and creaky floorboards to its outdated fixtures and drafty windows.

Subsequently, his favourite place in all the world was his humble little home, and more specifically, his warm, very comfortable bed where he enjoyed having a regular (it far surpassed the much more socially acceptable _occasional indulgence_ , now it was bordering on simply being _habitually_ _lazy_ ) lie-ins when he didn’t have morning classes at Satan’s arsehole-o’clock.

It’s why when his mobile started vibrating on the bedside table hard enough to make the water in the glass next to it tremble, Harry cracked open an eye and wished he could set the thing on fire. The screen had been turned up to boldly display the enlarged text of the caller ID (and oh, how his pride had taken a blow when he had to adjust that particular setting): _James_.

Fuck.

No matter how hard he glared at his phone and mentally told it to fuck off, it continued to cause a small earthquake. Harry knew James was stubborn enough to not be content to simply leave another voicemail this time. He had been dodging his calls for weeks now and the noose was tightening. Calling before the sacred hour of twelve o’clock meant business.

With a defeated sigh, Harry stuck one hand out from the warm cocoon of his blankets, answered the call, and plastered the phone against his ear. The glass screen was freezing. Harry was most displeased. “You know I hate it when you nag,” he greeted, his words emerging in a slurry of annoyed sleepiness.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have driven me to it, darling,” James said, his voice emerging in stereo surround sound. He was vexingly chipper and awake.

“Before you ask, I just want you to know that I’ve started making very good progress on the book because I know that’s the reason you’ve called.”

“You don’t know that.”

“That’s the only reason why you ever call. It’s the only thing that will get you to drop your croque monsieur and leg it over the channel. I know you think that should make me feel honoured, but it really, really doesn’t.”

There was a long, offended pause. “You know I’m a vegetarian now, Harry.”

Harry snorted. “I don’t think vegetarians enjoy a French cut prime rib on a weekly basis.”

“I can’t help that it pairs so nicely with the Dalmore.” There was a pause, and then, “Look, none of us are perfect. The important thing is that we are well intentioned and that we try.”

“Yes, because the first thing I think when it comes to you is _effort_.” Speaking of, it took Harry at least two attempts to disentangle himself from his blankets and sit up, his stiff joints complaining every inch of the trip. “So while this early wake up call has been pleasant and such, I’m already up and have so much to do, you know how it is….”

“I do know how it is, and do you want to know how I know, old chap? Because I know you,” James said. “Like how I know you’re probably still wearing those ridiculous pyjamas your cousin bought for you as a gag gift that you pretend to hate but secretly have a great affinity for—”

Harry looked down at his pyjamas, the ones with obnoxious union flags all over them. In his defence, they were very warm. “I am not.”

“—and that you’re like that cartoon dog meme. You know, the one that sits in a room on fire and says everything is fine?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You need to learn how to work the internet.”

“Are we done here? The water’s boiling now so I’ve got to—”

“No. No, we’re not done here. I’m not letting you wriggle off the hook for this one, Harry. We’ve got to talk, have a real face to face sometime soon. I’m your _editor_ and I don’t have anything to _edit_. It’s been eight years.”

“Seven and a half,” Harry corrected because accuracy was important.

“Eight years ago, you were the star of the literary world. Your name was all anyone could talk about, and today? The world’s moved on. They’ve even stopped asking about you. They’ve lost hope—no, it’s worse than that, they’ve stopped caring.”

“I just got an interview request yesterday,” Harry argued, affronted. “From some…” He waved a hand, trying to recall the publication that might have ended in _blogspot.com_ and when that didn’t seem to conjure anything, he stood up and went in search of his dressing gown, shivering at the chill in the air. Might have to think about getting better windows sooner rather than later. “Anyway, you’re being terribly dramatic about this.”

“Am I?” James asked, though it sounded more like an accusation. “The thing I love most in the world, Harry—”

“—More than Paris soirees and scotch? Your first edition of _Tender is the Night_?”

“—More than all those things,” James said pointedly, “Is finding and nurturing creative talent. It is my calling. It is what I was born to do.”

“Oh god. This again,” Harry said. His eyes rolled heavenward, praying for a reprieve.

“And thus it physically damages my soul to see that talent wasted and squandered away,” James continued, ignoring him. Fair enough. Harry was a devout atheist anyway. “You are killing me, Harry. You might as well stick the knife in yourself, because that is how I am feeling right now.”

“Can a soul be _physically_ damaged?” Harry wondered, making his way out of the bedroom to the stairs.

“You are being purposely obtuse to avoid the issue,” James huffed, and funny, his crystal clear voice wasn’t just coming through the phone’s speaker anymore. In fact, it sounded very much as if it were originating from….

“James,” Harry said slowly, pausing in the middle of the fifth step down. “Are you in my house?”

“Come down the rest of the way, Harry, I can see your fuzzy slippers from here. And those _are_ the pyjamas, aren’t they? Makes me want to start up a rousing rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’ right now.”

Harry viciously stabbed the _End Call_ button and didn’t stomp the rest of the way, but it was a near thing. He found James sitting redolently on his couch, one leg elegantly draped over the other, adorned in one of his audaciously modern tailored suits. He grinned up at Harry with the smugness of a house cat, which the arrogant sneer to his features lent themselves very well to. “How the bloody hell did you get in?”

“Do you recall that night approximately two years ago at my party when you finished off that entire bottle of scotch and ended up sick in my loo for the rest of the evening?” James smiled wider as Harry grimaced, vaguely recalling a night to that effect. “In between retches, you made a declaration of your henceforth sobriety and threw your keys at me with the instructions to completely rid your house of all alcohol.”

Harry frowned. “I don’t recall any of my alcohol ever gone missing except in the, er, usual manner.”

“Oh, I absolutely didn’t touch your liquor cabinet. What a waste of perfectly good booze that would have been!” James shuddered, but thank God for his sense of priorities. “Besides, by morning you’d completely forgotten what you said and had hair of the dog to remedy your hangover. I did keep the keys, though.”

“You let me believe I had dropped them on the roadside somewhere!” Harry accused.

James shrugged, unabashed to the last. “I knew they’d one day be useful, and here we are, having to corner my own goddamn author in his house just to get him to look me in the eye and tell me the truth.”

Harry looked away, dismayed to feel a flush of guilt. “Would you like a coffee? Tea?”

James leaned forward and planted both his feet on the floor. “Just tell me what’s going on, Harry. How far along are you?”

“Perhaps fifty pages. Maybe a little less,” Harry finally admitted.

James blew out a puff of air as his shoulders sank. “Three years. Three years, you’ve been telling me you were working on the book. Fifty pages in three years.”

“I _was_ working on the book!” Harry said sharply, suddenly angry. It was better than feeling like he had disappointed anyone. “Would you rather I fall into line and simply churn out an insipid novel about some white middle-aged professor who’s having an affair with his grad student while contemplating his inevitable mortality like all the other critically acclaimed authors in your stable? I’ll have one of those ready for you by next week once I shit enough on a piece of paper! _Publisher’s Weekly_ will surely love it.”

Harry may have flounced a bit to the kitchen, but he thought it was warranted given that James thought he had every right to lecture Harry in his own home at eight fucking thirty in the morning. He hadn’t even had his bloody tea yet.

Amidst the loud clanging Harry proceeded to carry out in getting the kettle to boil, James entered the kitchen and leaned against the counter, making it clear he was thoroughly unimpressed by Harry’s sulking. “Is it the teaching?” he finally asked. “Is it taking up too much time? Draining the reserves?”

“No.”

“... _are_ you sleeping with your grad student and contemplating your inevitable mortality?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, James!”

James lifted his hands in a show of surrender. “I just want to help you here, Harry, but you’ve got to give me something.”

Harry paused and sank against the counter beside him. He knew James was being sincere and genuinely did have his best interests at heart. James had never once pushed Harry to go against his own personal values just to make an easy sell, and for the last eight years, he had mostly backed off, given Harry his needed space. And what had Harry shown for it? Fifty pages of dubious quality and the keys to his geographically-valuable but highly unfashionable kingdom.

“I’ve been…” For lack of a better word, Harry had to settle on, “...paralysed every time I’ve sat in front of the screen these past few years. It’s not for lack of trying. I’ve tried. I’m still trying. There’s just been nothing there, James. Not until only very recently.”

“What’s changed?”

“I…” Harry closed his mouth, realising he didn’t have an answer. Or rather, didn’t have an acceptable one. Somehow, he knew that saying, _I ran into my the department’s new janitor, who’s very pretty as well as very, very young, and he made me want to write pages about the berry stain smear of his lips and the gold green gradient of his eyes_ , would only be opening himself up to a world of trouble, or, at the very least, severe and well-deserved mockery until the end of time. No, that would be disastrous. Dear God, maybe he really was confronting his inevitable mortality. “Really just...been fired up lately.”

James nodded in understanding. “It’s the endowment, isn’t it? Read about it in the paper, you know. Hell of a thing. I saw they were renaming your programme. Why on earth did you agree to that?”

“I was hardly consulted on the matter,” Harry said waspishly.

“Well.” A smile slowly started to curve up James’s face. “If what it takes to produce results is to start throwing spanners into your life, consider that my new purpose.”

It took a moment for that to sink in, then Harry backed away from him in horror. “No. Absolutely not. Look, you’ve got the answers you came for. I’ll keep in touch better this time now that I’ve actually got something to keep you updated about. Go back to Paris, James. We’ll both be much happier for it.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Damn that man, but in the face of Harry’s vociferous protests, James remained unmoved, both literally and figuratively. “It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed in London for any lengthy spell. I think it’s time I get myself reacquainted with it again, find out what’s changed, scout for new talent, keep on the _old_.” That last dig did not go amiss. “Besides, I should like to see the fallout of this whole Valentine thing. I hear there’s to be quite the celebration happening. Wouldn’t want to miss such a momentous event for one of my most valuable writers. I’m an editor who cares, Harry.”

“You’re a _menace_ ,” Harry hissed at him. Whatever earlier feelings of guilt he had for making James’s life more difficult had all but evaporated. But for a moment, Harry had forgotten how James always made things more difficult for _him_.

James stepped forward and slung an arm around Harry’s shoulders as the kettle started to sing. “I think we’re going to have a very good time together, you and I. Harry and James, back at it in Londontown!”

There was one phrase Harry had found on the internet that often seemed to most accurately depict the state of his life, and it ran repeatedly through his head at that very instant: _FML_.

 

_____

 

Bless Roxy, who appreciated a quiet atmosphere in which to work as much as Harry did. It was why he allowed her to shove several stacks of miscellaneous papers and books aside to claim a small corner of his office for herself to grade papers or work on her thesis, even if he happened to be there too. She was so pleasantly unobtrusive, sometimes Harry forgot she was there at all.

“What sort of books do you suppose she likes?” Roxy asked, apropos of nothing.

On the other hand, love was determined to make fools of them all lately.

“If I had to judge from her reactions to the readings so far….” Harry refused to look up from Hugo’s unfortunate short story about a shy young man who caught the eye of his crush, a tall and handsome fellow student in his class who had _burning coals_ for eyes and _chocolate curls_ for hair. At this rate, Harry was worried said love interest’s mane would have all melted off from the heat. “I’d say technical manuals. Perhaps those IKEA furniture assembly directions.”

He could feel Roxy’s glare like a hard strike to his kidneys. “Are you really this disinterested in your students?”

“I am when they wouldn’t actually care if the professor were to one day be replaced by a head of cabbage. And why are you so interested in students who most definitely are not any of your concern?” He glanced at her just in time to catch the fading blush on her cheeks.

“I like a good mystery,” Roxy said, effecting a dispassionate tone that didn’t fool him for a second. “Still waters run deep and all.”

“Yes. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” Harry muttered. “You could always try striking up a good old fashioned conversation. See where it goes. I hear that works wonders when all else fails.”

But Roxy just sighed as if Harry’s suggestion were too outlandish to even entertain. He’d probably have been better off suggesting she stalk Gaëlle’s Facebook or whatever social media channel du jour young people used these days. That was the new way to court someone, wasn’t it?

“I think what our dearest elder is trying to say, Ms Morton, is that if you like the girl, then go up to her and ask her out for drinks,” added James from where he was laid out on Harry’s leather couch, having displaced several boxes in order to do so. “Women are attracted to confidence.”

“Harry, why is there a strange man sleeping on your couch again?”

This time it was Harry’s turn to sigh. “Roxy, this is James Spencer, my editor and personal albatross who has little better to do than plague my existence like the telltale heart and is in town for a short while _only_. James, this is Roxanne Morton, my TA and advisee who can write two thirty-page papers on the failure of public policy and the linguistic intricacies of iambic pentameter, respectively, in one night but can’t go up to a girl and introduce herself.”

Harry went back to reading about Charlie’s muscular arms and life-transforming smile beneath the weight of twin glares. It was hard to decide which one was more preferable to face.

Before either one of them could start taking him to task, however, they were blessedly interrupted by a knock at Harry’s door. Alastair had impeccable timing, Harry could have kissed him. “Is this a bad time? Hello, Harry. I’ve come to collect your problem child.” 

“Oh, please.” Still, Roxy allowed the brief half embrace of her upper shoulders by her brother before packing up her belongings. “I’ll have you know that I am one of the few signs of life round these parts. Not that you’d know, surrounded by all your dead things.”

“Alastair is in the History department,” Harry explained for James’s benefit, which, in hindsight, if he had caught the growing speculative light in James’s eye sooner, he would not have done.

But it was too late. James smoothly stood up and his body turned as sinuous as a panther’s, a mindset he only ever adopted when something, or more often than not, _someone_ , had caught his fancy. He slid into Alastair’s personal space and extended his hand, which, at that proximity, was more like stroking Alastair’s chest. “Well, hello there. I’m James Spencer, Harry’s editor. So you like history, is it? I love history. I’m specifically interested in seeing what history we can make together.”

Roxy’s initial confusion gradually gave way to horror as she cottoned onto what was transpiring before her: a slow trainwreck in progress.

“Er. Yes. Hello there.” Alastair awkwardly patted James’s hand because he couldn’t twist his wrist the requisite 360 degrees in order to properly shake it. “Harry’s said...many things about you.”

“All terribly rude, I’m sure,” James said. “But I know he means them out of love.”

“I don’t,” Harry interjected.

“Don’t listen to a word he says, he’s just a bitter old man,” James concluded.

Alastair chuckled politely, darting a nervous glance at Roxy. “Well. We really must be going. I’m giving Roxy a ride up to our parents’ house for the week and would like to clear the M25 before rush hour.”

“Is that right? You know, I plan on being in London for awhile. We should go and grab coffee some time when you’re back,” suggested James. “I discovered this delightful little student-run cafe that lets you make your coffee exactly as you want it. Did you know about that one, Harry? They even have ice cream. I made myself a nice little affogato.”

Roxy turned around to face him, putting her back to James and her brother so she could mouth, _STOP THIS._

Harry pretended to shrug helplessly.

Alastair adjusted his glasses. “Oh. Yes, infamous little place round these parts.” Of course, the bastard had better coffee options over where his building was located. “I really should go. It was nice to meet you. See you, Harry. James.”

Roxy took that as her cue to squeeze herself between the two men, effectively prying them apart as she took her brother’s arm and forcibly dragged him behind her. “Yes, we really must. Come on, Ali. Off we go then. Goodbye, Harry.”

“Have a nice visit with your parents,” Harry said. “And remember you owe me a draft of your next chapter when you get back.”

“Right, will do.”

“I’ll get your number from Harry then!” James called after them, turning on his heel and pausing at the exasperated look on Harry’s face. “What?”

 

_____

 

Finally, as the afternoon waned and headed on towards evening, James buggered off in search of a vegetarian hamburger cooked as rare as he could get it, and Harry was at last left in peace. Without any more prying eyes looking over his shoulder, he pulled up his manuscript and sank into the world he was slowly crafting word by word. It might have been some ten painstaking pages later when there was another knock on his door, abruptly yanking Harry back to the present from the 1990s hellscape of Sarajevo to find Eggsy shyly poking his head into his office, looking every bit as refreshing as he had the first time Harry had ever laid eyes upon him.

“Hi, Harry.”

“Eggsy.” Harry pushed away from his computer and pulled off his glasses, knowing that if he could see himself as a bystander at this moment, he’d witness the stupid, half-besotted smile that took over his face. “Hello.”

They stared at each other for a full three seconds before Eggsy’s gaze slid past him. “Just...you know. Here to collect the bins.”

“Oh.” Right. “Right. Yes, of course.” Harry stood up so fast his chair wobbled, giving Eggsy open access to his rubbish.

Eggsy took a few tentative steps into his office, starting to bend down to reach the bins just as it occurred to Harry that he could very well have brought the bins to Eggsy himself and thus proceeded to do just that, setting their shoulders on an awkward collision course with each other.

They both leapt back. “Oh! Sorry—!” Eggsy began.

“No, no! I’m sorry. I was just going to—” Harry stuffed one hand in his pocket, but was too slow to save the other, which had already begun flapping idiotically in the air. “...help. Rather uselessly, I’m afraid.”

“It’s alright. You didn’t have to. But thanks,” Eggsy assured, ducking in quickly beneath the desk to grab the rubbish and quickly empty them lest Harry get it in his head to start eating his rubbish just to save Eggsy even that much trouble.

As it was, Harry only belatedly realised that Eggsy would see the embarrassing number of sweet wrappers today, none of it his. Fucking James.

He made sure to stand in the furthest corner from his desk when Eggsy returned to replace the bins, which made Eggsy smile at him in amused bafflement, and when Eggsy straightened, he lingered by Harry’s desk, apparently not in as much a rush to leave as Harry would have assumed. “So….”

“Those weren’t mine,” Harry blurted out.

Eggsy’s brow furrowed. “What?”

“The sweets. I had an old friend spend some time with me today. His motto tends to be ‘everything, in excess.’” Harry wanted to tell himself to shut up, shut up right now, but inertia carried him along. “I don’t know why I still put up with him. He makes my life utterly miserable sometimes.”

“Oh. Okay. Um.” Eggsy opened and closed his mouth a few times. “I mean, I wasn’t judging or anything. You could’ve just been a nervous snacker.”

“Right, I could have.” Harry seized upon it gratefully for all of a second before realising its implications. “Wait, do I look like I’m a nervous snacker?” It took a serious amount of restraint not to pat his stomach outright, but he might have slid his hand over it discreetly just to be sure.

“You? No! No, that wasn’t what I meant at all. You’re….” Eggsy sputtered. This time it was his hand that flapped about as he blushed prettily. “You’re…quite fit, actually.” His smile slid off his face as he thought about what he’d just said. “I meant that in the most general way possible. I wasn’t trying to, like, get in your pants or anything...oh, fuck me...oh, _shit_. I mean—”

“It’s alright,” Harry graciously said now that his vanity was appropriately gratified while the thrilling thought kept circling round and round his head like a boat with one paddle: Eggsy thought he was attractive. In an allegedly most general, irrelevant-of-pants way, but still. Still.

“So...like...you wrote that book, didn’t you?”

Harry blinked, trying to rewind the last few moments to catch up with the change in topic. “That book?” 

“Yeah, uh...that book.” Eggsy pointed, and Harry followed his finger to the softcover of Harry’s second ever book, _After Elise_. His bestseller. His magnum opus. The book that, eight years ago, won him a slew of coveted awards, the bright spotlight and adulation of the literary world, and sealed the deal on his tenure. The book that represented the peak of his entire career. “My mum _loves_ that book. Like, really loves it. It’s her favourite. I’m not even exaggerating. She even got it signed by you, I think. I didn’t make the connection until I saw it on her shelves this morning. She tries to re-read it twice a year.”

“Well. Tell your mother that I am very happy to hear it.” As ambivalent as he felt towards his last book these days, Harry certainly wasn’t tired of hearing praise for it. His toes practically curled as his ego was pleasurably stroked. “And you? What did you think?”

Eggsy fidgeted uncomfortably. “Uh. I….”

“Haven’t read it,” Harry concluded, deflating just a little.

“I’m not really much of a reader?” Eggsy offered. “But I want to! I mean, I hear it’s really good. Won loads of awards, didn’t it? And now that I know it’s you, I really am going to pick it up. It’s only like two quid at the thrift...er, not that that’s something you’d want to know.”

“It’s fine. It’s been eight years. That’s practically a whole geological era in the Lit world.”

“Have you got others?” Eggsy asked. “Books, I mean.”

“There was a freshman debut three years prior to that one.”

Eggsy looked at him expectantly for a long time before realising Harry wasn’t going to give him anything more. “That’s it? Nothing since?”

“No. Not at such.” Harry folded his arms across himself. “I’m working on a new book right now, though.”

“Yeah? Hey, that’s great. Took a nice long break then?”

“Something like that.” As unwilling as it had been.

“What’s it about?”

Harry scratched at a patch of skin above his brow. “Oh. Um. Loss. Memory and trauma...love?” God, he sounded like a twat. “Generally speaking.” Without warning, he crossed the room and pulled a copy of _After Elise_ from one of his shelves, turning and holding it out to Eggsy. “Here. If you wanted to read it. Save yourself two quid.”

“Really?” Eggsy smiled brilliantly as he started to reach out, but then paused, frowning. “But won’t that affect your sales?”

“It’s been eight years. I’m not too worried about it falling off the bestseller lists,” Harry said. “Tell you what, if you want to pay me back, read it and give me your honest review.”

Eggsy finally took the book with no small amount of hesitation, but at least his little cheeky smile made a return. “I could just read the Wikipedia article instead.”

“I’ll know,” Harry said mock sternly. “And then you’ll get points off for using a non-credible source.”

Eggsy let out a small laugh as his hand reverently skimmed the cover of his book, then he shyly looked up at Harry and held the book back out to him. “Do you think you could sign it for me too?”

Harry tried to temper his smile, but he feared he was doing a piss poor job of it. “For you, anything,” he said, and also feared in that moment he had been too transparent.

But if such simple words and deeds would always produce that quietly pleased look on Eggsy’s face, one that fell somewhere between surprise and immeasurable delight, then Harry found himself all too willing to do them again and again and again.


	3. Chapter 3

Early Thursday saw Harry accompanying Merlin on his morning run several times around the Serpentine because he had once mentioned, when deep into his cups, that he really ought to be taking better care of himself now that the resilience of his twenties had long since evaporated, and though he’d been under the assumption that anything that came out of his mouth whilst pissed was not, under any circumstance, to be taken seriously or followed (James implicitly understood this, one of his few virtues), Merlin had never, ever forgotten it.

“You really ought to take up a regular exercise regime,” Merlin said easily after sneaking sidelong looks at Harry’s much noisier exertions, all without breaking his long, swift strides.

Harry couldn’t even summon enough oxygen to think of, much less issue, a reply; he was far too preoccupied with simply not collapsing onto the bird dropping-splattered pavement in a puddle of sweat and tears. “Can...break...now?”

“Running with you _is_ my break. Oh for Christ’s sake.” With a roll of his eyes, Merlin directed them off the path and jogged in place while Harry bent over, hands pinched to his knees, trying to hoover in as much air as possible. “You look like a cat about to vomit a hairball.”

Harry could only glare at him. “I think we should call off our Thursday morning meets,” he finally said once he no longer felt like he was having a heart attack, “I’m trying something new this year: loving myself.”

“I thought that was a pastime you had long ago mastered, if not by choice.” Merlin always prided himself on his deadpan delivery, but his facade almost cracked, which, alright, Harry had set himself up for that one. “You were the one who wanted to get fitter since your body became older than most of the wines in your reserves and decided to expel its tapeworm. I’m just trying to keep you honest.”

“No, you’re trying to indoctrinate me into your insane little running cult.” Runners, Harry found, were all a little bit mad, and he would never understand them. They seemed zealously committed to brutally punishing their bodies nearly every day, in just about every sort of weather condition and temperature, for an activity that would eventually wreak havoc upon their joints, all while wearing obnoxiously designed clothing. It _was_ practically cult-like. The so-called runner’s high couldn’t possibly explain the rabid enthusiasm.

“Besides,” Harry flapped a dismissive hand as he straightened and tried to shake off the burning sensation in his legs. “I’ve found another way around the whole metabolism problem.”

“Existing on a diet of alcohol and dramatic irony is not exactly a medical professional’s definition of healthy.”

“Isn’t the science always changing?”

“Are we ready to continue?” Merlin asked with a hint of testiness, looking like he’d love nothing more than to bound off without Harry, but Harry knew better: Merlin would never pass on an opportunity to witness his suffering.

He continued shaking out his limbs in hopes they operated on the ‘just need a little push to get started’ idea of Newtonian physics. “Just so you know, if I go into cardiac arrest and die, I’ve left you nothing.”

Eventually, his wobbly foal’s legs got on with the programme and off they went once more.

After capping off their run with water from Pret—well, Harry did as Merlin was one of those insufferable types who strapped a stainless steel water bottle to his hip—Merlin insisted on walking back down through the park, which, at such an early hour and on such a rare cloudless day, was far more enjoyable when one wasn’t submitting one’s body to self-torture.

Merlin finally had it out. “You’ve been in a mood. James can’t be that bad this soon. What is it you’ve said about it? He’s more like internal bleeding than an aneurysm.”

“It’s not James,” Harry said, then amended, “Well. It’s not _all_ James. On one hand, he’s stopped pestering me about the book. On the other, he’s supplanted it with pestering me about Ali. Did I tell you he’s convinced Ali’s the love of his life? They spoke for all of fifteen seconds.”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes.” Merlin did so love playing Devil’s Advocate, even when he didn’t necessarily believe in the stance he proposed. His shit eating grin when Harry gave him a sour look proved as much now.

“Leaving off the fact that James falls in love at least twice a day with anyone from his flight attendant to that tarot card reader in Montmartre—” Harry had never taken so much delight in being able to say that love just hadn’t been in the cards. “—There’s also the somewhat more pertinent issue of Ali being straight as an arrow.”

Merlin smirked. “Much to Gay London’s eternal disappointment.” He must have been recalling Harry’s 45th birthday at the club where Alistair had broken several hearts that night. To this day, there were many in the gay community who still refused to believe a man who danced that well was straight. If Harry hadn’t personally witnessed it for himself, he’d never have believed it either.

“So when that all falls through, I’m not looking forward to the drunken weeping that will be occupying my couch for the foreseeable future.”

Merlin dared to laugh. “Better yours than mine.”

“Yes, well, it’s also probably because I actually own a couch that bears a degree of cushion and not some modern cubist horrorshow that pretends to be seating.”

Merlin scowls. “You did not just disparage my beautiful, ergonomic couch. At least I don’t own furniture that looks like it was inherited by my dowdy spinster aunt.”

“Are you calling my tastes fussy?”

“I’m calling your entire existence fussy,” Merlin says unrepentantly.

There was a long spell of mutually disgruntled silence after that, which was fine. Harry contented himself with watching the play of early morning sun glimmering off the water and the swans gracefully drifting by.

They’re just past the Sackler Gallery when Merlin finally spoke again. “And?”

Bewildered, Harry asked, “And what?”

“You implied that James was only a small contribution to your frustrations,” Merlin explained in the exaggeratedly patient tone he reserved for when he thought one was being particularly thick. “Ergo, there are others, and larger ones at that.”

Harry blew out a breath of exasperation. Dog with a bone, Merlin was sometimes. “There’s the department meeting today. You know what they’re going to talk about.”

“The celebratory prostitution of the academic institution’s virginal halls to a soulless corporation?”

“It’s a wonder why you weren’t a Literature major.”

“So you’ll get through this one like you’ve done everything else. You’re a six-figure salary earning faculty member. I suspect you’ll weather this storm better than others.”

Despite his continued unhappiness with the whole state of affairs, and really how the issues went further into a realm far more sinister than their glibly traded remarks, Harry fought to keep the smile off his face. “Won’t you just let me be petty with my First World problems for even a few moments?”

“Someone’s got to keep your hubris in check. I consider it my sacred duty.”

Harry was just glad he’d mostly put Merlin off the scent, though. In truth, his general disagreeableness did in part stem from all of the above, but also because (and he was fully aware how deeply pathetic it was, which was why he wasn’t telling anyone, ever) he’d missed Eggsy’s visit last night thanks to an impromptu dinner invitation from one of his staff that prevented him from returning to his office until well past nine o’clock.

He couldn’t stop himself from snooping about the floor, as well as the ones below and above it, like a deranged stalker, trying to see if Eggsy were still around. He hadn’t been, so Harry had gone back to his office and tried to work on the book, made fuck all progress, and finally gave up and went home where he then proceeded to drink himself to sleep, utterly forgetting Merlin would show up on his doorstep the next morning in alarmingly small running shorts, looking annoyingly chipper for a man whose smiles made him look like he was a passing alien who had accidentally shrunken his human skin suit in the wash.

It was honestly embarrassing to have allowed his little infatuation to have come this far already, he was starting to remind himself of James’s antics with his lovelorn moping, and that was never a good look on anyone.

But Harry still couldn’t help wondering about a hundred different things, a number that kept increasing exponentially as other possibilities occurred to him. Things like whether Eggsy had started reading his second book or was just trying to be nice. Like how Eggsy looked while reading (Did he bite his lips? They looked well bitten and red). Was he enjoying it? Did he hate it and secretly think Harry was an overrated hack? Did his mother enjoy the signed copy? Did he read before bed, by the dim illumination of some lamp on the nightstand, until his eyelids grew heavy and the words blurred together on the page? Did he like to read somewhere serene and beautiful? Did he dogear his books or put them half-split and face down on the table until the spines cracked, or did he treat them kindly with a bookmark? Did he underline phrases and quotes? Write notes in the margins? What was his handwriting like? Was it tight and cramped? Elegant and sprawling? What did it say about Eggsy himself?

And Harry knew, _he knew_ , how stupid all of that sounded. He's known Eggsy for less than a week.

Thus it was decided. He couldn’t let it go any further than what it was: a pretty young boy with an engaging personality whose job unfortunately meant he had to suffer Harry’s neuroses (and increasing perversions) on a nightly basis.

Harry really ought to do them both a favour and start timing his office stays much later into the night. In fact, he was determined to do precisely that from now on.

 

_____

 

“What is currently being passed around is a timetable of the celebratory events,” said Chester King as the alluded to sheets were circulated among the faculty with all the joy incumbent of someone on a street corner trying to shill flyers to their standup comedy show. “The Chancellor thought it would be best to host the celebrations over the next three days in order to fully accommodate all the colleges benefiting from Mr Valentine’s generous gift. We share our day with Computing Technology by some design even I don’t understand.”

It was rumoured King had been aiming for the Business School. Sometimes Harry wondered how desperate King was to jump ship; he was always cosying up to the Dean there. Beside him, Leonard, their Medievalist, coughed to cover up the derisive snort that had almost slipped through.

“Did you have anything to add, Professor Jones?” King asked.

“No, sir. Sorry, sir. Tea gone down the wrong pipe. It was too hot,” Leonard said to his notepad, cowering beneath King’s withering gaze. It was hard to believe such a mousy man had an almost childish glee for battle axes and spears.

“Perhaps going forward I should ban the drinking of all beverages during these meetings so as not to enable any further disruptive incidents.” Point made to his sufficiently horrified audience, King added, giving Leonard an arch look, “See that you take better care next time. Now, as I was saying….”

“Wanker,” Leonard said under his breath.

As King continued to outline the festivities (various AI demonstrations, campus tours, some readings by the English department, a performance by the Music department, a retrospective film of Valentine’s various philanthropic activities over the last three decades from the Visual Arts department, a press conference, as well as several awards ceremonies, lunches and dinners to announce new scholarships and chairs), Harry pinched the tender patch of skin beneath the bridge of his glasses and closed his eyes.

He wished their little faculty conference room had a window, but it was not to be, positioned as it was in the centre of the floor. Instead, there were rich wood paneled walls and floor to ceiling bookshelves lined with many handsome leather bound books. There were overstuffed chairs and plush rugs and a fireplace that was never lit. There were oil paintings on the walls that depicted all of the Great White Men of British Literature, and to dare suggest anyone different was akin to blasphemy. And then there was the grand polished oak table at the centre, which King fondly called his round table, even though the thing was a bloody rectangle and King was certainly no Arthur.

There was plenty of ostentatiousness to be had, but no windows. Maybe King was afraid one of them would be tempted to throw themselves out of it.

While it would be nice to share his miseries with Merlin at the festivities (everyone was calling it V-Day, how quaint), it also meant Merlin would have a front row seat to his humiliation. He glanced down at the programme and, ah, yes, there he was.

“Now, while I know, Harry, that you haven’t got anything new going at the moment, I didn’t want you to feel left out of the proceedings. And given that your programme is one of this department’s more prominent beneficiaries, I think you should introduce me before I introduce Mr Valentine,” King said, giving Harry a look that was at once both smugly satisfied and vaguely threatening. “You have one of your little workshops that day, I’ve noticed, but I think this occasion merits a cancellation, doesn’t it?”

Harry fantasised about picking up Leonard’s too hot tea and hurling it at King’s head. It was the only way he could get away with blandly smiling and saying with any degree of sincerity, “Of course, Chester. I’d be honoured.”

“Good, that’s settled then,” King said, returning Harry’s tight smile. “Let us now move on to—”

“Excuse me, sir,” interrupted Diana, their Caribbean Studies expert. “But don’t you think with the stalled wage negotiations and pending strike action, the timing of all this looks to be in bad form an optics standpoint?”

“I don’t see how the two are even remotely connected,” King said dismissively.

To her credit, Diana’s expression did not shift from its usual eternal patience. “ _The Independent_ already wrote an article on how our institution, one of the wealthiest in the country, is refusing to increase the minimum wage for hourly staff despite the figures that show the rising living costs have nearly tripled since—”

“Yes, I’ve read it. It was a very poorly written, unfair piece. Full of errors and untruths.” King’s face was becoming noticeably redder. Harry narrowed his eyes to focus on the faint outline of that little vein in his forehead becoming more prominent. “I’m appalled you would even think such a story has any significance here.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Chester.” There was a cool bite to Diana’s tone now, ice laced with steel. The entire room felt as if it had dropped in temperature by several degrees. Leonard took a slurp of his tea. “There’s already talk of staged protests to coincide with all your festivities if this last round of negotiations doesn’t yield anything productive. Some of our own students are helping to organise them.”

“Then tell your students, Ms Ashby, that anyone who dares to disrupt the proceedings on private property will be arrested, and any student or staff with an arrest on their record is grounds for immediate expulsion.”

To that, Diana had no reply, but the expression on her face was such that if King were found murdered in his office the next morning, Harry would have little doubt as to who would have done it.

Then again, he thought as he looked around the table at the various reactions ranging from mild discomfort to pure venom, maybe the perpetrator wouldn’t be so easy to figure out.

“Nevertheless,” King went on with the pinched expression of one who was made to smell his own flatulence, “Ms Ashby does bring up a matter that must be addressed: the strong possibility that talks between the administration and the union will fall through.”

“And how are we to frame the situation to the students, sir?” asked Walcott, who was one of their most recent, if controversial, hires: a specialist in 20th Century critical theory. Harry was fairly certain Walcott was taking the piss as he was probably going to use the situation as a teachable moment on the evils of Capitalism as first warned by Marx.

“We are to tell them that this university pays its staff some of the highest wages in the land and that further pay rises would directly impact their tuition,” King said with false pleasantness. “Let’s see how politically active they’ll be feeling after that.”

On the meeting went to cover student issues, policy changes, current faculty searches, and the Chancellor’s new business objectives for next year, all of it with a low-grade stewing resentment. Harry tuned most of it out as King was barely concerned with the going-ons of his programme unless it was to discredit or humiliate him in some fashion, and seeing as how he would receive an excess of that soon enough, Harry was left alone.

That was, until after the meeting was adjourned and various professors couldn’t slip out from the room fast enough.

“Oh, Harry,” King called out just as Harry had much hoped to do the same. “Could I have a word?”

Fuck. Jones spared him a look of sympathy as he passed by, clenching his thermos.

Harry grimaced but managed to smooth out his face by the time he made his way back to the table where King remained seated at its head. “What can I do for you, Chester?”

“I wanted to talk to you about Charlie.”

Double fuck. “Ah.”

“He still insists on pursuing this writing rubbish.”

“I had gathered that was the case when he kept enrolling in my workshops.”

King glowered at his impertinence. “You and I both know his talents are being wasted here. A degree in creative writing. He might as well set his tuition money on fire for what good it will do him.”

Harry demonstrated great restraint in not asking after those supposed talents. But God, he really should start carrying a flask around. “It’s really not my place to judge what value my students place on the studies they wish to pursue, only the quality of the work I am being asked to assess.”

“Be that as it may, as Director and a...a once favoured author of his,” King gritted his teeth like he was swallowing down something painful. That must have been very difficult for him to say, “I would like for you to start encouraging the boy in other pursuits. By any means possible, if you must.”

He blinked, not sure if he heard correctly. “Sorry?”

But King looked him steadily in the eye. “I refuse to let my nephew throw his life away for harebrained notions of romance and art. He showed me some of his work. It’s dreadful. You can’t disagree with me there.”

By all accounts, Harry considered himself to be a mild-mannered man. He was certainly prone to peevishness, perhaps more readily than most, but minor irritations aside, there were very few things in life that could genuinely elicit his anger.

This, however, was one of them. Possibly because he was now being put in the awkward and surreal position of having to defend _Charlie bloody Hesketh_ ’s writing, of all things.

He felt his heart beginning to race. Imagined his blood starting to bubble in his veins. All that pressure, that anger, felt like an expanding balloon in his chest that threatened to burst. “Writing is a craft that must be honed with years of practise.” Perhaps in Charlie’s case, many, many years. “I hope you don’t mind me saying that I find your request more than a little insulting and, frankly, incredible coming from the Head of the English Department.” His voice was so calm and steady, it didn’t even feel like a part of him.

“Oh, come off it, Harry.” King scoffs. “Don’t give me that ethics rubbish. Everyone in this department knows humanities degrees have diminishing returns. If we really wanted to teach our students something useful, we’d tell them to change their major as soon as possible.”

“I’m happy to give my students a realistic career outlook of the field they wish to pursue,” Harry said, and it was true that humanities jobs did not frequently lead to great material wealth for most. “But I won’t intentionally discourage or sabotage anyone’s desire to study what they want. Not even your nephew.”

“Would you in all good conscience say the same to someone from the lower classes wanting to pursue a writing degree? Tell them to pursue their lofty artistic dreams when a STEM degree would actually help them put food on the table?”

“Exactly how many of those students can afford to come here?” Off the top of his head, Harry could only think of three, all on scholarship, who were pursuing degrees in computing or engineering. “And seeing as how Charlie is being well-supported by his father’s immense fortunes, I’m not too worried about how he’ll end up.”

It was becoming clear to King that Harry was not going to change his mind on the matter. His face was now a mottled red. His vein was pulsing like a writhing eel beneath his skin. “You’re contributing to the ruin of that boy’s life!”

“Funny how your beloved Valentine doesn’t seem to think so, what with all that money he’s giving us.”

“Valentine is a bloody eccentric billionaire who’s throwing money at any and everything his daughter has ever interacted with at this university.” King sneered. “There’s a women’s toilet he’s getting named in her honour.”

“Huh.” That caused Harry to raise his brows. “...will there be a plaque?”

Had Chester been a few decades younger, Harry could imagine him leaping over the table in an attempt to strangle him. His whole body had twitched forward in the aborted urge. “You’re making a mistake, Harry. You know our government is increasingly doing away with support for all these useless subjects taught in school. Most of the humanities will be a thing of the past in due time, and people like yourself will be made irrelevant.”

“Then that would be a great tragedy for all of us, Chester,” Harry said, suddenly tired of the entire hideous conversation. He started for the door, unable to withstand remaining in this room for another second, but when his hand was on the doorknob, he paused and turned around, realising he wasn’t done. “A business or science degree may feed one’s bank account, but humanities and the arts feed one’s soul. They teach us how to use our critical faculties. They allow us to see and think about the world in all the ways that may matter the most. Clearly these are muscles you haven’t engaged in quite some time. I understand the feeling. I only get about to running once a week. It’s deplorable. I shouldn’t even be doing it all. I’m liable to cause severe harm.”

With that, Harry left, unable to keep from satisfyingly slamming the door behind him, childish as it was.

He looked at his watch. It was almost 6pm. King and his bloody late afternoon meetings that left everyone wrung out. He could go back to his office, try to calm the seething fury that still made him feel hot and restless, maybe wash out the bitterness in his mouth with more scotch.

But then Eggsy would come by with his sunshine smiles and bright eyes and Harry would lose all his resolve, dying a little bit more inside the while Eggsy would just go on, oblivious to a pathetic old man in his wake. Worse, what if Eggsy ever became aware of Harry’s idiocy and was appropriately disgusted? In either case, it led to a dismal end.

He needed to stay away for now. He needed to occupy his mind with something else until this fixation passed. He needed a drink.

 

_____

 

“Goodness, Harry. I haven’t seen you so determined to find the bottom of your glass since the end of your last relationship,” James remarked after watching Harry drain his latest glass of scotch in three swallows and slam it back down on the sticky wood. He leaned forward from across the table, eyes gleaming. “Tell me, is it romance gone awry?”

“Yes...no. No.” Harry shook his head, then had to hold it when everything began to swim. “A romance would be gravely overstating things.”

“So there _is_ someone.”

James’s grin of delight was probably inappropriate for the situation, and later Harry would realise in horror what he’d done in confessing to what he had, but for now, he could only morosely contemplate whether to make his next order a double. “Have you ever looked at your life and wondered how it all got to be so...entirely unrecognisable?”

James made a sound of agreement and shrugged. “Of course.”

"Really?" Harry was hooked, intrigued and surprisingly touched by this rare admission of deeper contemplation from him.

“But then I simply learn the name and address of the person whose bed I ended up in last night...finding a bill of some sort is usually a reliable and covert way to do that...call a taxi, get back to my merry little life.”

Harry groaned and planted his face into his hands.

“What?” James asked in genuine confusion, but wasn’t troubled enough by it to stay curious for long. “Alright, seeing as how you feel the need to remain as dramatic as possible about your love life for the moment, let’s talk about mine.”

“Love life, is it? Here I was thinking I was being made a witness for a future restraining order.”

“I knew it from the moment I first saw him: Alistair is the man I was always meant for.” Upon seeing Harry’s unimpressed look, James wilted. “I can’t believe you aren’t supporting me on this, Harry! I am your _friend_.”

“I am being cruel to be kind,” Harry insisted. “Alistair is my colleague, and my TA’s brother, and...and heterosexual! He’s not your soulmate, James. He...likes to read ancient bookkeeping scrolls and makes obscure history jokes no one else understands and his idea of a good time is spending a night going through the Royal Archives. You and he could not be more different.”

James stared at him, poleaxed, like Harry had just admitted to accidentally running over his favourite pet.

And then he rallied, because he was James and impervious to all common sense. “Opposites attract, Harry.”

Harry stared at the table in disgust and thought about bashing his head into it repeatedly.

“Besides, I could learn to love those things! They _sound_ fascinating! He likes to teach, I like to learn. It’s perfect. We’re perfect.”

“You’re impossible and I’m not going to waste my breath anymore on this.” He was simultaneously too drunk and not drunk enough for this conversation. “Let it be known that I will say, ‘I told you so,’ when you come crying back to me later.”

“Fine,” James said snappishly. “Let’s talk about your progress on the book, shall we? When do I get to see pages?”

Harry winced. “...can we skip that part as well?”

“How about a deal,” James proposed, and from the tone of his voice, Harry knew to be wary. James’s ideas almost never turned out well for him. “I won’t ask you about the book for the next six weeks.”

Which was too good to be true already. “In exchange for…?”

“You help set me up on a date with Alistair.”

Harry stared at him, nonplussed. “You must be joking. Did you not hear a word of what I said?”

“I’m perfectly serious,” James said, throwing his arms open wide and almost smacking the blokes at the next table over. “If I can’t occupy my time by reading your new material, then I shall have to otherwise find something else to entertain me.”

“Roxy would _kill_ me for even trying,” Harry hissed.

“She weighs, what, eight stone sopping wet?”

“She’s a fourth degree black belt in karate.”

James mulled that one over. “She probably won’t do anything that causes lasting damage. She still needs you to sign off on her thesis after all.”

“I hate you so much.”

James gave him a pleased smile as he took a delicate sip off his gin flight. “That’s acceptable. The only thing one should dread in life is to inspire apathy.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to concernedlily & scandalmuss for gifting me with Tequila's real name :D

“In that moment, he appeared to me as beautiful as Ganymede. I was Zeus, struck by one of my own bolts of lightning,” said Hugo, glancing up from his story to pin Charlie with a surprisingly bold look that lasted nearly five seconds before it skittered back down to the page, leaving behind only flushed red cheeks as evidence of his painfully obvious infatuation. “If only I was half that mighty, a god in my own right, that could even hope to capture his fealty, much less attention.”

Harry couldn’t help a nervous glance over at Charlie, who was heavily engaged in something on his phone. Judging by the way Charlie kept angling both it and his face into various poses, puffing out his lips moodily like a pouting child or trying to feign a contemplative gaze into some middle distance, Harry suspected he was attempting to take a series of not-so-covert selfies. Normally, such rude behaviour would be called out, but in this particular case, it was probably best for all involved.

This whole situation was painful. _Literally_. His entire body was going to be screaming bloody murder at him tonight because of the tense way he’d been holding it all throughout Hugo’s excruciating recitation. Surely his teeth were now little more than dull nubs in his mouth for the way he kept grinding them. He was possibly having a seizure. Or a stroke. What was the one where half one’s face drooped like melting ice cream in the sun?

At any rate, no one else seemed to notice his wretched condition. Harry could have probably dropped dead five minutes in, and not one of his students would have picked up on it until the end of class when they were to inevitably complain about the imminent deadline for some forthcoming assignment they knew about for weeks in advance.

Eventually, Hugo’s voice trailed off on the haunting phrase, _buttocks captured in marble, perfection in memorandum_ , in which Harry promptly aged another ten years. After a long pause, the class dutifully, if somewhat unenthusiastically, applauded.

As the lacklustre claps tapered off, the room fell silent. When no one immediately jumped in to comment, the needle moved from _expectant_ to _awkward_. Harry cleared his throat, prompting all heads in the room to turn to him. Bugger. Shit, shit, shit.

“Well,” he began, taking his time in peeling off his glasses in order to appear thoughtful and authoritative. “That was….” He waited for inspiration to come to him, and when it didn’t, he resorted to his favourite teaching/stalling tactic: “There’s a lot to unpack here.”

He was rewarded with several nods. Encouraged, he moved on to his second favourite teaching tactic. “Who would like to comment first?”

After trying to coax words from the blank faces around him and succeeding about as well as getting blood from a stone, the air beside him began to vibrate with failing restraint.

He sighed.

“I think this Ganymede bloke sounds like a bit of an arse,” Roxy declared.

“Miss Morton,” Harry wearily tried. “You’re not actually a part of this workshop.”

“Well, I did hear the whole story,” Roxy argued. “I don’t think this Henry character ought to bother with Charles. Charles sounds full of himself.”

“I don’t think so,” Charlie said, apparently satisfied with his latest Instagram update. “Charles is the epitome of perfection and beauty. There’s nothing wrong with loving something that’s perfect. Do we look down upon someone who loves Leonardo da Vinci’s _David_?”

“Da Vinci?” Roxy echoed in incredulity. “Are you really that da—”

“Anyone else care to comment?” Harry cut in, sincerely hoping there wasn’t that note of desperation in his tone he thought he heard.

Gaëlle pushed her hair back over one shoulder like a matador shaking out her cape.“I would further add that perceptions about Charlie’s actions and behaviours are because he’s so unknowable to the readers. We do not understand his motivations. Perhaps if Hugo fleshes out this character more, we will better understand his desire for Charlie in a way that is more acceptable to Miss Morton.”

Harry stared at her, honestly at a loss for words.

“ _Exactly_ ,” Roxy said, awestruck, before her brain gave her a mental kickstart and she blinked, coming back to herself. “Wait, what?” 

“It’s Charles, not Charlie,” Hugo muttered, staring down at his hands.

Gaëlle arched a brow. “Sure.”

 

_____

 

The end of class could not have come soon enough before Harry burst through the doors to the outside world like an oxygen starved diver breaking the surface of the ocean to suck in fresh air. Well, perhaps _fresh_ was a bit optimistic given the rancid stench of car exhaust in the air and the rubbish bins lining the streets awaiting pickup.

He turned his wrist up to glance at his watch, mentally flipped off Merlin by reflex for always giving him a hard time about owning one that was still analog and couldn’t even be excused as an expensive family heirloom (it was some cheap rubber wrist watch he bought for about £5 in Camden market because he didn’t need a watch that told him the time in five different time zones or performed advanced calculus), and swore. He had three minutes to clear a five-minute walk back to the English department if he wanted to make it in time for their latest faculty interview. He suspected Chester was responsible for that ill timing.

So it was he had to suffer the indignity of _running_ back to his building, which was an acceptable activity when in the appropriate athletic uniform and not a wool cardigan, trousers, and oxfords. By the time he rounded the corner and the English department building came into sight, he was out of breath and discombobulated in both appearance and mental acuity such that he nearly ran right into Diana, who appeared at the same time, in nearly the same place, as him and was just as frazzled.

“Oh, sorry!” Harry huffed out, keeling over and trying to gather his breath. Perhaps he really ought to take up running with Merlin more, but God, at what cost?

“It’s alright, Harry,” Diana replied just as breathlessly.

“Had to leg it for three blocks.”

“I had to come from south campus!” Diana said, dotting her forehead with a napkin, the poor woman. “I even let my class out fifteen minutes early, but you know it’s not so easy as that.”

They shared a commiserating glance as they walked into the building’s lobby together. On the bright side, at least he had confirmation he wasn’t Chester’s Most Hated in the department. It was faster to take the stairs than wait for the creaky old lift, even if it was a three-storey climb, which meant stumbling into the conference room red faced, sweaty, and gasping like pack-a-day smokers.

Naturally, the rest of the staff was already fully assembled.

Chester gave them the stink eye despite knowing full well he engineered the whole humiliation. “How nice of you to join us, Harry, Diana.”

Harry kept it short before taking one of the few remaining seats left at the end. “Apologies.” Excuses would be useless, and besides which, he still couldn’t speak in full sentences yet.

It was only when he settled down and began rifling through his leather satchel for the candidate’s requisite interview materials that he realised he left them in his office. Shit. Again.

“Here,” Diana said from next to him, holding out everything he was missing. “I made extra copies. Lord knows Chester’s too cheap to print them for us in advance.”

“You’re a blessing,” Harry told her, accepting the packet and trying to refamiliarise himself with the latest hopeful to join their ranks.

On paper, Tracy Clinton was already impressive, and a name not only well familiar to Harry and the entire department, but to a good many people across the world, having obtained the enviable achievement of being a #1 _New York Times_ bestseller and a critical literary darling (“It’s been a long time since we’ve had one of those,” Chester had remarked when the CV first came to their attention, giving Harry a pointed glance). Iowa Workshop graduate. National Book Critics Circle Award recipient, with a half-dozen other awards in his back pocket. Multi-million Twitter follower count. Et cetera, et cetera, viral memes, ad nauseam.

Standing before them in the flesh, however, nobody could possibly have predicted how remarkably young and fresh faced Mr Clinton would turn out to be. He was as tall as Harry himself, but whereas Harry had difficulty fleshing out into the third dimension, Mr Clinton was simply physically _massive_ with a broad chest and shoulders that looked as if they could easily bench press three times Harry’s weight. His skin was tan in the way that spoke of active days outdoors beneath spacious skies and amber waves of grain. His teeth were white from some effortless, low-key combination of luck, good genes, and Crest Whitening Strips. To add insult to injury, his face had the remarkable quality of appearing both boyish and ruggedly masculine at the same time, even though he was breezily approaching forty.

But above all, Mr Clinton held himself with a confidence that could only be described as _American_. Only an American would unabashedly stand before a British university English department that consisted of some of the nation’s most insular and elitist snobs (worse: snobs with _advanced degrees_ ), wearing relaxed fit denim jeans and cowboy boots.

Mr Clinton looked around the room. “Howdy!” came the twang, accompanied by a big grin.

“Save a horse, ride a cowboy,” Diana muttered, practically pumping out pheromones right there on the spot.

Harry looked at her askance.

As Mr Clinton read a chapter from his highly anticipated, soon-to-be published third novel (and didn’t _that_ smart) and then proceeded to answer their questions with articulate and well thought-out answers, Harry realised despite how utterly qualified Mr Clinton was for the position, Chester would never have given this man a chance in a million years if there weren’t larger machinations at work.

“What a remarkable candidate,” Chester was the first to remark after Mr Clinton thanked everyone and swaggered out of the room. “He would be a great asset to your programme, Harry. Dare I say, a candidate you could even groom to take over when you’ve had enough.”

“If it were entirely up to me, I would have hired him yesterday,” Harry agreed innocently enough. “He’d be an excellent mentor for Charlie.”

Chester glowered. It was particularly satisfying. “I’ll expect your assessments on my desk by tomorrow morning,” he said, turning back to the rest of the group. It was an excessively cruel timeline, but no one dared complain. “Oh, and Harry?”

“Yes?” Harry asked with a sense of foreboding.

“I know you were supposed to take Mr Clinton out for lunch today, but my evening plans have unexpectedly changed and I can no longer cover dinner. I propose we switch our times.”

“That,” Harry says, gritting his teeth, “Would be fine.” It wasn’t, really.

“Excellent.” Chester smiled with the pleased expression of one for whom the world usually bent over backwards as a rule. “And Diana, why don’t you join me for the lunch as well?”

Diana froze like a terrified rabbit. “Thank you for the invitation, Chester, but I’m afraid I’ve already agreed to attend the workers’ union meeting during that time.”

Everyone looked at her in horror as the pleasant expression melted off Chester’s face. “You do realise as faculty, you have a duty to your department.”

“Yes, but—”

“And you’re up for tenure in, what is it, three or so more years, perhaps?”

Diana paled. “Something like that, yes.”

“Chester,” Harry dared to say in the ensuing quiet, “Diana’s the faculty liaison between the union and the administration. I’m given to believe they’re at a critical juncture right now, is that not so?”

“You would be correct, Harry,” Diana said, giving him a grateful look.

But Chester was not at all appeased. “I don’t care if someone was holding your child hostage and you had to be involved in the negotiations, Diana. Think carefully on where your priorities lie.”

After a terribly long moment of tense silence, Diana finally said, “Of course I would be happy to attend the lunch with you.”

But outside the conference room, once everyone had fled back to their cubby holes and offices, Diana threw her open bag—papers, pens and all—at the wall and shouted, “Buggering, shit bastard!”

As the last syllable echoed down the hall, Harry gingerly stooped to gather up her scattered belongings. “I’m sorry. Chester is a brute.”

“It’s more than that, Harry, it’s….” Diana sighed and ran a frustrated hand through her hair. “Right now, the university is refusing to pay our manual and ancillary workers a livable wage, and the cost of London living is only going up. They’re actually getting pay demotions each year when you think of it. All while people like Chester rest comfortably on their inheritances and speaker fees and six-figure salaries.”

Harry blinked, somewhat taken aback by the genuine anger in her expression. “I hadn’t realised you were so impassioned about this.”

“I may have done well for myself, but most of my family and friends of my family still work in positions that are profoundly affected by situations of this sort.” Diana had been born in Jamaica, Harry vaguely recalled. “I’ve seen both sides.”

Guiltily, Harry realised that up until now, the fraught negotiations between the administration and the union had largely remained peripheral to his awareness and he hadn’t much concerned himself with any of it. One of those privileged people who could rest comfortably on their inheritances, book sales, and salaries. It was the same for everyone he knew. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Diana just smiled sadly at him. “Not today, no, I’m afraid. But thank you for giving a shit for the moment.”

 

_____

 

With his prior lunch plans now fallen through, Harry decides to a) not let a reservation at a good little Italian trattoria go to waste and b) use the opportunity to tackle another lingering issue in his life by wrangling a lunch date with Alistair.

Thus he found himself sat across from the unsuspecting man in question at a small table that could barely hold their bread basket and water glasses while said unsuspecting man kept giving Harry and the excellent crusty bread he was dipping into olive oil longing looks that bordered on the obscene.

“Just eat the damn bread, Ali,” Harry said mildly.

“I’m can’t, I’m in ketosis,” Alistair said mournfully. “There’s a tournament on Sunday.”

Ah, right. Alistair was an avid Crossfitter and yet, incredibly, didn’t talk about it very much, which went against type, in Harry’s experience. “You,” he declares, pointing the last hunk of his bread at Alistair, “And Merlin both disgust me.”

Alistair heard those very words from Harry often enough he didn’t even react. “We can’t all keep a foothold on our youth through sheer spite, Harry.”

Not knowing if he ought to take offence or not, Harry gamefully chose to ignore the remark all together in favour of moving on to the _raison d’être_ of this whole invitation. “Are you currenty seeing anyone, Ali?”

The abrupt change of subject noticeably threw Alistair, but so much the better. Best to keep him off his game and go in for the kill when he was vulnerable. “Nothing too serious. Why?”

“What did you think of James?”

“James?” Alistair asked, confused.

“The man you met in my office last week.”

“Your editor?” Alistair further clarified, and upon Harry’s nod, actually put some thought to his answer, which was, as expected, very non-committal. “He seemed very...forward, but nice enough, I suppose. Why?”

“He’s pretty much attracted to anything that moves and has a pulse. You could say he’s pansexual, but really, he’s just very slutty. I know you generally don’t have a problem with either of these things among your social set, else you would have run screaming from us a long time ago.”

Understandably, Alistair was bewildered. “Why are you telling me this?”

Harry took a deep breath and said a private goodbye to the rest of the wonderful remaining bread and the excellent meal he would have to forfeit. “Because I brought you here under completely false pretenses. And I feel very guilty about that, but we all have to do what we can to survive, Ali, and certain sacrifices must be made.”

Understandably, Alistair was now very alarmed, gripping the edge of the table as if bracing for impact. “What do you mean? What have you done, Harry?”

“This is no longer a congenial lunch between friends. It’s a romantic date between you and my editor.” With that news dropped into Alistair’s lap like the results of an unplanned pregnancy, Harry stood up. “He’s generally quite harmless, but always exasperating. When he’s drunk, he shouldn’t be allowed to interact with strangers. Don’t let him through your front door or he’ll never leave.”

“ _What_?”

Harry didn’t know Alistair’s register could reach such heights. “I’m sorry, Ali. But when you think about it, it only has to be the one date. Just lie back and think of England.”

“But I’m _straight_ ,” Alistair hissed, as if Harry forgot.

“It’s really more of a scale, you may come to find,” he said optimistically as he started to back away.

“No, wait! Harry! _Harry!_ ”

Deftly avoiding Alistair’s desperate last-minute attempt to latch onto his hand and prevent him from leaving, Harry made his way to the bar to collect his thirty pieces of silver, leaning over James’s shoulder and idly noting the nearly empty wine glass in his hand. “It’s done.”

“Always a pleasure doing business with you, Harry,” James said as he turned around and smiled.

“Do be nice to him,” Harry warned, already feeling the oily skin of shame over his filthy deeds. “He’s an innocent.”

“You wound me,” James said as he slid out of the bar seat, daring to look offended. “I have nothing but the best intentions towards the greatest love of my life.”

It did nothing to comfort Harry as he watched James slink into his vacated seat across from Alistair, who stared at James as if he were encountering an alien species for the first time in his life.

James leaned slightly forward and said something very quietly, subconsciously prompting Alistair to mirror him. It was a rather well-practiced trick he employed on all his conquests from the start. Harry winced, suddenly recalling his church days as a boy, and was tempted to pray to that God he no longer believed in to forgive hm this latest transgression.

And yet, whatever James said seemed to do something rather miraculous: the hard line of Alistair’s shoulders melted into a relaxed curve. The tense set to his pale features eased into something like gentle bemusement...and something more.

Huh, Harry thought, unsure of what to make of this unexpected turn of events.

 

_____

 

“You don’t like me very much, do you Harry?”

Harry froze. Mr Clinton smiled just as pleasantly as if he delivered an amusing anecdote, and the gap between the tone of the question and its contents left Harry at a loss. He took another sip of his scotch to buy himself some more time before finally settling on, “I don’t know what you mean.”

The dim lighting of the upscale restaurant favoured Mr Clinton’s natural colouring rather well, but then, Harry suspected bitterly, one would be hard pressed to find any sort of lighting or situation that would do wrong by him.

“I’m very good at reading people,” Mr Clinton said, then laughed a little before finishing the dregs of his own bourbon. “It’s all about the micro-expressions.”

“I’m about to write you a glowing recommendation for immediate hire,” Harry said, arching a challenging brow. “It would be odd for me to do that for someone I don’t like and wouldn’t care to work with.”

“I think you’re fully capable of maintaining professional boundaries as necessary, but professional tolerance isn’t personal affinity.”

How precocious. “Are you so desperate to be liked, Mr Clinton?”

“You can call me Tracy, you know,” Tracy said. “Or, if we get on well enough, I’d even let you call me by what all my friends do.”

“And what is that?”

“Tequila.”

Harry strove to remain neutral but was fairly certain he ended up falling short of the mark into nonplussed instead. “That sounds like an entertaining origin story. I’m not entirely sure of its appropriateness for a job interview, however.”

“You don’t strike me as a pearl clutcher. Now, _your_ boss, on the other hand….”

“Chester King. He likes to uphold tradition.” It’s the nicest way Harry could put it.

“He really hates my guts,” Tracy astutely said, “But my connections are too good to pass up.”

Smarter than he looked, Harry grudgingly allowed. “And what would those be?”

“My family is the Calhoun Group. We probably own half the whisky and bourbon on either side of the pond.”

Harry exhaled a bit too noisily, but it was better than choking on his drink. “Ah.” That explained a lot. Even Chester was willing to overlook a lack of pedigree in the face of such possibility.

“But if we’re being honest,” Tracy leaned forward and delivered, _sotto voce_ , “I don’t really need this job. Given, you know, the family business.”

“Then...why?” Harry couldn’t help but ask. “You could go anywhere, I’d wager. There are better recognised programmes than ours. Why even bother with academia? Your sales are good enough to maintain a sole writing career.”

“I like Kingsman,” Tracy explained. “I like you. You know, _After Elise_ is my favourite book of all time? Got me through a really bad period in my life. I look up to you. The chance to work with you, Harry. I couldn’t pass it up. That’s the real reason why I’m here.”

The boldness of the statement rather floored him. It’s not that Harry hadn’t receive praise and compliments before, but it certainly hadn’t happened all that _recently_ and with such unpolished sincerity.

In reaction, the only thing Harry could do was what any proper Englishman would do when faced with such circumstances: be hideously embarrassed. “Perhaps your judgement ought to be questioned. A decade ago, I was where you are now: the world was at my feet.”

Best selling book. Critical darling. The Golden Boy. Twitter hadn’t been very well established then, though.

“I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.”

Warmed by good drink, Harry decided to gift him this one small pearl of wisdom. “There are two paths upon which you can now embark,” he said. “One will take you to heights far greater than mine. You’ll...have a career that will far outstrip anything I could even imagine.”

Tracy humoured him, eyes gleaming. “Alright.”

“The other is...one very similar to how it went down for me,” Harry concluded, finishing his glass and barely even feeling the burn in his numbed throat.

“If I may ask...what happened?”

Where would he even start? A decade gone by and he was barely a hundred pages into another book, suffering at the cruel whims of his egomaniacal boss, exposed to lurid descriptions of Charlie Hesketh’s divine anatomical parts as rendered in purple prose, and hopelessly besotted with a twenty-something-year-old janitor who’s had more intimacy with his dustbins than Harry himself when he was far too old to be suffering another midlife crisis.

“I don’t know,” Harry finally said, shaking his head. “Circumstance? Personal failings? Fortunately for you, you seem primed for overachievement.”

Tracy shook his head in denial, still so earnest. “I’m not looking at this as a competition, Harry. I have a lot to learn from you, I know that.”

Harry gave him a pitying look. He’ll learn eventually, or be chased out of the Ivory Tower altogether no matter how much talent he had. “You’ll come to find, Mr Clinton, in the small pond of academia, the politics are _cutthroat_.”

 

_____

 

He wasn’t weaving, Harry firmly told himself. He had an iron constitution, hailing from a long line of esteemed and hearty drinkers, purveyors of the finest spirits Britain had to offer. Besides, there’s no way he’d allow himself to be outperformed by a jumped up cowboy who wore a mini-flask belt buckle.

Despite these firm truths he told himself, the corridors of the English department remained precarious and gravity as unstable as quicksand. Still, he was very proud of himself for successfully locating and getting into his office with only minimal fumbling.

However, now that he was ensconced in his office, the prospect of trying to get through a few more pages of his novel was a lot less attractive than when he had been wandering the chilly streets after a very good meal and even better libations. Cradling his heavy, muddled head in his palm, he was considering his couch and how a brief kip on it would be welcome right about now when the door to his office burst open, quite without Harry’s permission.

“Jesus fucking hell!” Eggsy shouted after practically skittering back out the door upon seeing Harry. “Fuck! Sorry! You scared the shit out of me!”

Fortunately, Harry was far too pissed to give in to a similar outburst. “This is my office. Why?”

“It’s just that…” Now that his initial startlement had passed, Eggsy’s cheeks were prettily flushed red. “You’re not usually here this late. Or, I mean, suppose _I’m_ not usually here this late either, but….”

“I had to entertain a potential colleague for dinner but I wanted to try and get some work done before I called it a night. Why are you here this late?”

“I’m running a bit, uh...behind. There was a bit of trouble earlier today at home, and then at the uni and...well….” Eggsy scratched the back of his head before flapping his hands around. “I’ll just empty your bins and be on my way, yeah?”

It was only when Eggsy was practically leaning over his lap in a very inspiring manner that it occurred to Harry he ought to move back to give him better access. To his bins, of course, dirty old man. After a wobbly start, he overcompensated and his chair jerked back so abruptly without warning, Eggsy stumbled and almost beaned his head on the edge of Harry’s desk.

Harry’s heart leapt into his throat as he lunged forward in a very uncoordinated attempt to catch him. “Oh God, sorry!”

Fortunately, Eggsy had better reflexes than Harry as his palms shot out and braced themselves on Harry’s thighs. His grip was delightfully strong. His hands were very warm, emitting a heat that travelled up Harry legs and was settling into other areas. Thank fucking God for all the whisky he drank.

When they accidentally met each other’s wide eyes, they both seemed to realise where Eggsy’s hands were at the same time.

“Fuck! Oh fuck, sorry!” Eggsy quickly retracted his hands back like he’d touched a hot pan and stood up.

“It’s, uh, quite alright. I shouldn't have….” Harry trailed off, letting his weakly flailing hand indicate the rest.

“I’ll just...then.” Eggsy made an abortive start forward to resume his previous intentions, then seemed to have an internal argument with himself as a look of annoyance and, eventually, determination settled across his features. It all culminated with a confident bend forward to pluck Harry’s dustbins from the floor and sweep them out of the room.

When he returned with the empty bins in hand, he seemed to have regathered his wits, giving Harry a little laugh that bore traces of ruefulness rather than embarrassment. “Sorry. I don’t usually make it a habit to molest the professors.”

“It’s fine. Most action I’ve had in awhile,” Harry said, then immediately wanted to bash his forehead into the nearest hard surface.

But his feelings did a complete turnabout upon witnessing Eggsy’s grin, lovely thing that it was, brighter than any of his office lights. “And here all this time, I thought you were avoiding me.”

Harry’s smile dimmed. “Whatever would make you think that?” Even though it was completely and wholly true.

Not expecting Harry to further interrogate what had clearly been issued in jest, Eggsy’s actions only gave way to the briefest of stutters as he set the bins on the ground and gave him a casual shrug. “You used to be in your office a lot earlier, then you weren’t.” He looked like he wanted to say more, forcefully stopped himself, but perhaps the impulse was too great as he quickly spoke in a rush: “If it was the book thing that put you off or offended you, I’m sorry. I swear I don’t usually do that. Really. It won’t happen again.”

“Have you started it yet?” Harry couldn’t help but ask.

It clearly threw Eggsy for another loop, but maybe he was getting better at handling the curveballs Harry kept throwing at him because he recovered much faster this time. “I...yeah. Yeah. Finished it, actually.”

It was Harry’s turn to be surprised. “That was fast. The thing’s a door stopper.” Of course, the burning question was there. _What did you think?_ He bit his tongue. Anxiety coiled in his belly, which wasn’t a great complement to the alcohol.

He might as well have said it anyway with the knowing look Eggsy gave him. “I admit at first, if I hadn’t known it was written by you, I might not have, uh, made it past the first chapter.”

Harry frowned, stomach sinking. It was fine, of course. Everyone entitled to their opinion and all that.

“But I’m glad I carried on with it, because then I couldn’t put it down. Which was hard, because I got a lot of shit to do, but...yeah.” Eggsy bowed his head shyly, rubbing at his ear, then his neck. “Now I know what my mum was on about. First book I finished since school. Fuck, I didn’t even read what I was supposed to even in school. That is to say, I really liked it, Harry. You’re....really fucking good.”

Just like that, an invisible weight Harry didn’t even know he was carrying abruptly lifted from his shoulders. The sickening sensation in his stomach turned into fluttery delight and a lightheadedness that could not be attributed to the waning effects of booze.

The silence stretched on, and Harry continued to obliviously stare at Eggsy like a lovesick idiot. Increasingly nervous, Eggsy started babbling. “I think you’re quite the romantic. It comes out in all the descriptions and the way the characters look at the world, even with a history of a ruined city. But the main bloke wool gathers too much, yeah? He’s passive, ain’t he? Lets everything pass him by, the good and the bad, it was frustrating at times. I just wanted him to fucking do something, you know? He wanted so much but never seemed to do a fucking thing about it—”

“Would you…” Harry began, promptly shutting Eggsy up much to their mutual collective relief. Only, what started as an impulse finally caught up with him. Shit. He was about to verbally backpedal on the whole insane notion when a recollection of Alistair and James back at the restaurant, and Alistair’s expression, fortified his courage. “Would you...care to...to go out some time?”

Eggsy straightened up from where he had been leaning against Harry’s desk. “Oh. Want me to go?”

“No!” Harry practically shouted, causing Eggsy to jump. He closed his eyes and tried to speak with a modicum of dignity. “I meant... _go out_ , go out. With me. To a place outside my office. At another point in time.”

Christ, he’s supposed to know how to use his words.

Eggsy just stared at him blankly. “Ain’t you a bit…?”

“Old?” Harry finished, vaguely hoping the ground beneath his feet would open up and swallow him up. That would be far less torturous than this whole situation right now.

“Drunk,” Eggsy corrected.

“Oh,” said Harry, thinking upon the matter. He felt tired now more than pleasantly sozzled, with the promising beginnings of a headache taking up lodgings somewhere at his temples. “Not any more so than usual, if I’m being honest.”

“So you’re…” Eggsy said, still uncertain. “...serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“You wanna go on a date,” Eggsy reiterated.

“Yes.”

“With me.”

“Very much so,” Harry said, and perhaps he was still a bit too drunk, because upon reflection, the words emerged a little too heartfelt and it was all somewhat humiliating. “You don’t have to, of course. As a writer, I’m well accustomed to rejection, I can assure you. And it won’t have to change anything.”

“I can’t,” Eggsy said.

Harry snapped his mouth shut. Oh. Well, that was that. 

“I mean...I work every week night,” Eggsy went on to say. “And I got another job on weekends and...other things, but, uh...I could maybe try and switch some things around. Yeah, I could make it work on a weekend. Probably. If that’s...alright?”

Eggsy looked tentatively at him like he was certain Harry was going to write him off as too bothersome to deal with. Like that was what _he_ was well accustomed to.

Little did he know that Harry thrived in fussiness.

“Yes,” Harry said. “I’d like that very much.”

Eggsy’s brilliant smile was worth any amount of trouble that could possibly come.

**Author's Note:**

> Come shout at me on [tumblr](http://futuredescending.tumblr.com).


End file.
